From humble beginnings in a car shed, GoBumpr has now wooed Girish Mathrubootham

GoBumpr is an online platform and app that assists consumers with vehicle servicing.

A platform that helps people find and book the best quality mechanics in Chennai, GoBumpr claims to have seen a 40 percent month-on-month growth, and has on-boarded over 40,000 customers with over 1,200 service centres and mechanics.For Karthik Venkateshwaran, starting GoBumpr was a no-brainer — he himself had faced a flat tyre in the middle of the night and had struggled to get it fixed. A platform that helps people find and book the best quality mechanics in Chennai, GoBumpr claims to have seen a 40 percent month-on-month growth, and has on-boarded over 40,000 customers with over 1,200 service centres and mechanics.

For Karthik Venkateshwaran, starting GoBumpr was a no-brainer — he himself had faced a flat tyre in the middle of the night and had struggled to get it fixed.

Launched in October 2015, the team had recorded over 100 transactions within two months of launch. The platform initially worked with local unorganised mechanics but now has authorised services centres and multi-brand garages to cater to vehicle owners' needs.

GoBumpr, which began as a team of five people working from a car parking shed in Mylapore, Chennai is now a team of close to 30.

Apart from addressing vehicle owners' needs, the GoBumpr team helps service centres adapt to digital and mobile technology.

Founding team @ GoBumpr

The evolution

Founded along with Nandha Kumar — his friend from IIM Shillong and co-founder of his previous startup Northerly — and his childhood friend Sundar Natesan, GoBumpr is a technology and marketing platform where one can offer, promote, market, sell, and manage their services online. GoBumpr’s partner interface facilitates real-time automation of service booking and customer engagement processes, right from the start of service booking to vehicle delivery including timely service updates.

The digitisation of the automotive after-service

While platforms like Ola and Uber may be converting millennials from ‘owners’ to ‘sharers’, the Indian automobile industry nevertheless saw a whopping 23.7 million annual production of vehicles in FY 2014-15. This contributed to over 7.1 percent of the country’s GDP.

And of this, the automotive component industry fetched over $35 billion during the year. Auto ancillary exports fetched $10.2 billion in the same year.

About 40 percent of service providers in top-tier cities fall under the organised sector. GoBumpr is one of several players in a segment that includes MotorExpert, MyPitstop, MeriCAR, and Cartisan.

MeriCAR.com has had two rounds of investments from My First Cheque and Rajan Anandan (personal investment). Now, they are looking to raise a larger funding round.

In 2016, SpareHub raised an undisclosed amount of pre-Series A investment from Hyderabad Angels and Singapore-based M&S Partners. Zonnet also raised funding of Rs 2.5 crore and had plans to raise $10 million in Series A funding.

According to an ICRA report, of the automotive replacement market's total estimated turnover of $8 billion (excluding the sales of batteries and tyres), around 75 percent is contributed by passenger vehicles and two-wheelers.

The report also estimated that the size of the replacement market, including the sale of auto spare parts and labour charges for car servicing, is estimated to have grown at 15 percent CAGR over the last five years. The growth curve clearly indicates the industry is likely to invite some more players.

Funding

GoBumpr has raised $300,000 in funding led by The Chennai Angels. The investment round was led by Mahalingam K, Partner, TSM Group, who owns and operates South India’s oldest and largest used cars business.

Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO, Freshdesk, has also invested in the startup as part of this round. GoBumpr had raised funding from Keiretsu Forum Chennai Chapter six months ago.

With this round of funding, GoBumpr intends to strengthen their market presence in Chennai and Coimbatore and expand to other cities and even better their technology platform. Karthik adds that the team’s primary focus is to make automobile servicing a hassle-free experience both for vehicle owners and the service mechanics. Karthik says,

Once we provide the best service experience for consumers, our obvious extension could be to evolve into a more wholesome platform catering to selling and buying needs of the consumers. People who service their vehicles with us are already making enquires with us and are looking for a credible platform to sell their vehicles or buy used/new vehicles.

The future

The vision, he adds, is to digitise the automobile after-market leveraging mobile technology. GoBumpr has started working closely with the service centres in solving some of their genuine pain points in addition to simplifying vehicle servicing for owners. This has indeed helped them build robust technology solutions for garage owners in helping them adapt to mobile and digital technology in their run-up to serving their end-customers better.

The team is strongly focused on stabilising their operations and building a core organisation structure. Now based out of Chennai and Coimbatore, the team’s next target city is Bengaluru. The team, in fact, claims to have already made a soft launch of their service solutions in the city and have received good response from the garage owners.

The team is also looking at other Tier II and III cities for which they are looking at partner interfaces in local languages for service providers. Girish says,

GoBumpr’s mobile CRM empowers the service mechanics who are going online for the first time in India via their mobile devices. They don’t have computers or laptops but all of them have smartphones with internet. GoBumpr is connecting the India two service mechanics supply with the India one customer demand.